alpinist. With Ulrich Führer as her guide, she completed the first traverse of the Lauteraarhorn–Schreckhorn (AD, 1902) and made an epic attempt on the unclimbed North-East Face of the Finsteraarhorn (now graded ED1 with several pitches of V) lasting 57 hours with a retreat in a blizzard. This climb was well ahead of its time, more appropriate to the bitter Teutonic struggles of the 1930s than an English lady climbing at the turn of the century. Despite these very considerable achievements, women were not admitted to the Alpine Club for over a hundred years, and even then several male members (including Bill Tilman) resigned in protest.
The two leading male alpinists in the years leading up to the First World War were John Ryan, who almost always climbed with the guides Franz and Josef Lochmatter, and Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who often climbed with Josef Knubel. Ryan was an Anglo-Irish landowner. A difficult and charmless man who ‘seldom carried rucksack or ice axe, and...never cut a step’, he was blackballed by the Alpine Club for ‘incivility to some older members’.43 As Geoffrey Winthrop Young observed: ‘The gods who showered on him all worldly gifts, withheld the power of ever appearing happy.’44 He was, nevertheless, a very able climber. In 1905 he made 25 ascents including the North Face of the Charmoz (D+). In 1906 he climbed the North-West Ridge of the Blaitière (TD), the Ryan–Lochmatter Route on the Plan (D+) and the Cresta di Santa Caterina on Monte Rosa (TD). He also climbed the South-West Face of the Täschhorn with Young, Knubel and the Lochmatters, a huge, loose rock face almost 900m high that was not repeated for 37 years (and then using pitons) and still maintains a serious reputation with a grade of TD+. During the climb Ryan confided in Young that the year before he would not have cared a damn which way it went, live or die, but that year he had married. He did not climb at a similar standard again until 1914, when he put a new route up the Nantillons Face of the Grépon. He was badly injured in the First World War and did not climb again.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young was perhaps the best British alpinist in the early part of the twentieth century and had a profound influence on the development of the sport over the next 40 years. He was proposed for membership of the Alpine Club by Sir Alfred Wills, whose ascent of the Wetterhorn opened the Golden Age in the 1850s, and he knew Joe Brown who played a key role in re-establishing Britain as a leading climbing nation in the 1950s.
Born in 1876, the second son of Sir George Young, although he never exactly fitted the mould of an establishment figure, he was nevertheless part of the British ruling class and saw nothing wrong with using his extensive network of friends and relations to advance his career and various causes. When he was a boy, Sir Leslie Stephen and Lord Alfred Tennyson visited his family home on an island in the Thames near Cliveden. It was a prophetic meeting since in later life Young would gain recognition as both a climber and a poet. His father made the first ascent of the Jungfrau from Wengern Alp in 1865, but all mention of climbing was forbidden in the Young household following the death of Sir George’s brother while climbing Mont Blanc in 1866. Despite or perhaps because of this, Young was attracted to climbing while a student at Cambridge, where he wrote The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity in 1900, in a style parodying early alpine guides: ‘In these athletic days of rapid devolution to the Simian practices of our ancestors, climbing of all kinds is naturally assuming an ever more prominent position...’45
A climber, poet, educationalist and ‘athletic aesthete’, Young knew that climbing was just a sport, but was convinced that it had an intellectual and spiritual aspect lacking in other sports. He combined a mystical approach to climbing with practical organisational abilities which he put to use in his Pen-y-Pass meets, as president of the Alpine Club and in the formation of the British Mountaineering Council.
Young was sacked as a teacher at Eton in 1905 and as a school inspector in 1913, in both cases probably because of some homosexual impropriety. When he was not climbing he was drawn to the homosexual clubs and boxing booths of Soho, Paris and Berlin, where the thrill of illicit sex and danger of public exposure seems to have appealed to his risk-taking instincts. His writing combines romanticism with striking homo-erotic imagery, such as his description of a rail journey to the Lake District: ‘That first rough hug of the northern hills, where the arms of Shap Fell reached down in welcome about the line, and the eye, bored with the dull fleshiness of plains prostrate and flaccid under their litter of utility, can delight in the starting muscles and shapely bones of strong earth, stripped for a wrestle with the elements – or with the climber!’46 He also reveals something of his motivation for climbing, and perhaps his sense of guilt at his (then illegal) sexual orientation: ‘In return for my guardianship of their integrity [the mountains] offered me a sanctuary for all the higher impulses, all the less sordid hopes and imaginings which visited me anywhere through the years.’47
Since most climbers were (not surprisingly) less than forthright about their sexual orientation it is hard to judge how prevalent homosexuality was in climbing circles at this time, but it was probably fairly common. Many leading climbers, both before and after the First World War, went to Cambridge University, where homosexuality was both widespread and generally accepted. On Young’s side, at least, part of the attraction in his relationship with George Mallory and Siegfried Herford appears to have been physical. All three climbed naked together on the granite sea cliffs of Cornwall, which must have encouraged a good climbing style. Herford also joined Young on some of his visits to boxing clubs, but whether he went in search of sex or simply the thrill of ‘slumming it’ is unclear.
After climbing in Wales and the Lakes, Young met Josef Knubel in 1905 and started his alpine career. In 1906 he climbed the South-West Face of the Täschhorn with Ryan. In 1907 he climbed the Breithorn Younggrat (D) and the Weisshorn Younggrat (D). He followed this in 1911 with the Brouillard Ridge of Mont Blanc (AD+), the West Ridge of the Grandes Jorasses (D) and the Mer de Glace Face of the Grépon (D), which he climbed with Ralph Todhunter, who had the strange affectation of climbing in white gloves, and Humphrey Jones. Jones became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society the following year before dying with his wife and guide while climbing in the Alps on their honeymoon. Todhunter was killed in the Dolomites in 1925. Young’s last major route in the Alps was the Rote Zähn Ridge of the Gspaltenhorn (TD- with pitches of V), which he climbed with Siegfried Herford in the last summer before the outbreak of war in 1914.
Young hated the war hysteria that gripped Britain in 1914 and attended a peace demonstration in Trafalgar Square, ‘the last protest of those who had grown up in the age of civilised peace’.48 However, he felt unable to remain inactive when so many of his friends were volunteering and so acted as a war correspondent and subsequently helped to found the Friends Ambulance Unit, ‘work...for men who wished to die if need be with their contemporaries but not to fight with them’.49 A man of extraordinary personal courage, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he received several decorations, including the Légion d’Honneur. He lost his left leg in Italy in 1917, but his commitment to climbing and love of the mountains remained undiminished:
I dream my feet upon the starry ways;
My heart rests in the hill.
I may not grudge the little left undone;
I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.50
THE LAKE DISTRICT
The inn at Wasdale Head was the first home of the British climbing community that began to form in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.51 Originally called the Huntsman’s Inn, later the Wastwater Hotel, it was started by Will Ritson, who added a wing to his farmhouse to accommodate visitors and obtained a licence in 1856. Ritson boasted that Wasdale had the highest mountain, the deepest lake, the smallest church and the biggest liar in England. He once won a lying contest outright by declaring that, like George Washington, he could not tell a lie. He was a sportsman, drinker and raconteur: ‘Landlord, waiter and customer by turns.’52 Although he retired in 1879, his spirit lived on in the hotel, which continues to attract fell walkers, climbers and other eccentrics to this day.
The
